As network technology such as the Internet or the like has been developed and become widespread, a demand for creating a website has been rapidly increased. A website contains one or more web pages including a hyperlink, and each web page includes layout information based on text data, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), or XML (eXtensible Markup Language), embedded image, audio, moving picture, or the like. Such web data composing a website, namely web contents are provided as files.
Files of web contents are created by utilizing application software having a web page creation edit function in a local environment of a client terminal, for example, a personal computer or the like. Created files of the web contents are then transferred to a web server using a tool such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software, and are published on the Internet with predetermined domain names and IP addresses.
Transfer of files of web contents to a web server is performed by executing mirroring upload by, for example, FFFTP which is one of the FTP software and is widely used in a program of Windows (a registered trademark). In this file transfer, since the same configuration of folders and files as that of the local environment of client terminal is created in the web server, the change of the files or the like in the local environment can be reflected in the web server.
In file transfer by the FTP software, such as FFFTP or the like, since software for creating and editing a web page in a client terminal manages the memory of folders and files based on a physical directory structure thereof, the folders and the files are transferred sequentially in order of folder names and file names according to such a physical directory structure. The file transfer is performed without taking into consideration a reference relation between files, in particular. In addition, with web contents complicated and diversified, while the number of configuration files has increased, file transfer takes time, and therefore the reference relation between files by hyperlink or the like has also been increasingly complicated.
Usually, a web server only stores and operates web contents for a website, while update of web contents or the like is performed by a website creator side, and it is not performed by a web server to examine whether or not a link relation between files gets discontinued to deal with a problem. Hence, when files are transferred to a web server, anything bad is going to happen in the reference relation between files. That is, in the web server, a situation that the link relation between transfer files gets discontinued such that a file to be referred to has not been transferred yet, etc. may occur. For that reason, when there is an access to a website during file transfer, there occurs a problem that a failure such as an error is caused with a display of the web page. Due to this problem, although the web contents themselves have been completed, quality of the web contents is recognized to be inferior by a web user, resulting in decline of evaluation to the website.